Oculus Rift goes on sale in the UK

More than four years since it launched on Kickstarter to widespread excitement, the Oculus Rift is finally available to buy in the UK.

The virtual reality headset – which went on sale in the US earlier this year – goes on general sale today at £549. It can be bought at John Lewis, Currys PC World and Game Digital, as well as luxury department store Harrods.

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That cry has been heard ever since Oculus inventor Palmer Luckey posted his Kickstarter listing on August 2, 2012. The Rift reached its target within 24 hours, raising a total of $2.4 million (£1.8m); two years later, it was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion (£1.5bn).

Yet as Oculus prepared its launch, rival companies jumped ahead. Samsung Gear VR launched in December 2015 (albeit with Oculus' tech inside it); HTC’s Vive, widely considered the leader in the market, went on sale in April 2016.

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What took so long? “When you launch a product you always have to prioritise where you’re going to focus," Luckey tells WIRED. "We could have done some kind of retail launch earlier but we really wanted to have a strong one where we were going to have strong demos and well-trained staff and basically the whole experience."

To introduce consumers to the technology, Oculus has organised live in-store demos at various retailers. Eager early adopters can schedule appointments using the Oculus Live page on Oculus' website.

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Among the retailers holding demos is John Lewis. "We've seen interest in virtual reality rise dramatically this year, with sales of the Samsung Gear VR surpassing our expectations," says Will Jones, head of buying for communication technology at the department store.

The Rift will come with a selection of free games, including the vertigo-inducing The Climb, and the animated short film Henry, which earlier this month became the first VR film to win an Emmy.

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However, users won’t be able to watch Henry immediately, unless they also have the powerful desktop PC needed to run the data-hungry Rift. Oculus' minimum recommended specifications include a GTX 970 graphic card, which costs around £240 on Amazon. There are also a number of other costly additional extras.

Taken together, a new user can expect to spend at least £600 on PC equipment alone – more if they would like to play complex, multiplayer games. For gamers who have PCs already, Oculus offers a compatibility test to ensure they set up with the correct kit.

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This version of the Rift is also missing Oculus Touch hand controllers, without which most games are only loosely interactive at best. Oculus has not set a date for release for these controllers. All this means that VR – which has been hailed as a computing breakthrough equivalent to the smartphone – is unlikely to make its great breakthrough this year.

"If VR was cars, we’d still be driving Model Ts," says Luckey. "It is definitely really early." Still, he has faith in the power of VR.

“Most people are going to use virtual reality as part of their everyday lives," he says. "I think we’re going to be moving seamlessly between the real world, the virtual world and things that are in between mish-mashes of the two."